HS FOOTBALL: "The Coin Toss" proves to be the lasting legacy of 1988 season

Jonathan Hull | jhull@mrt.com

Published 5:32 pm, Saturday, November 23, 2013

Photo: Norman Johnson

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HS FOOTBALL: "The Coin Toss" proves to be the lasting legacy of 1988 season

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The 1988 high school football season in the Permian Basin might be the most well-documented in the history of the sport.

That was the year a writer from Philadelphia named H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger made his way to West Texas and documented Odessa Permian’s season in the book Friday Night Lights, which has been called the greatest sports book ever by ESPN.

But the lasting moment of the 1988 season didn’t feature a strong-armed quarterback, a quick as lightning running back or even a timely batted down pass by a future NFL linebacker.

Twenty-five years ago, the battle for a postseason berth out of District 4-5A wasn’t decided on the gridiron, but at a truck stop, and the ramifications of that coin toss are still felt today.

No great feat of athleticism was performed during the early hours on November 5, 1988, assuming the flicking of one’s thumb isn’t considered athletic, but of all the legendary moments recorded in Friday Night Lights, “The Coin Flip” stands above all.

“It has a life of its own,” said legendary Permian coach John Wilkins, who was Ector County ISD Athletic Director in 1988.

Never before had three teams been good enough to lay claim to a district title in the Little Southwest Conference. But having Midland High, Lee and Permian share the district championship wasn’t the real issue. Only two of the three could advance to the playoffs, and there was a tie-breaker system in place that no one considered altering until it became too late.

“I don’t know that anybody had imagined that situation would occur,” said Gary Gaines, who was the head coach of Permian in 1988. “I never dreamed of it happening. I could see two-way ties, but not a three-way tie. We just never thought about it actually happening until the last couple of weeks of the season when we all realized it was a possibility.”

The Build-up

With two weeks left in the regular season, it appeared Permian and Midland High were bound for the postseason. The Panthers sat atop the district with a 4-0 record with the Bulldogs and Lee just behind them in a second-place tie at 3-1.

As long as Permian and Midland High each won in Week 9, the Bulldogs would clinch its first playoff berth in 36 years thanks to having defeated Lee, 35-21, during the opening week of 4-5A play. All Midland High needed was a win against Odessa High in Week 9, which the Bulldogs got, 33-10, and have Permian take care of its business against rival Lee.

Unfortunately for the Bulldogs, the Panthers, who had defeated Midland High, 42-0, earlier in the season, didn’t hold up their end of the bargain.

Trailing, 21-16, at halftime, the Rebels managed to shut No. 5 Permian out in the second half, and blocked a fourth-quarter field goal attempt by the Panthers to pull out a 22-21 upset win.

“Our kids played a hell of a ball game,” recalled Earl Miller, head coach of the 1988 Lee team. “They had two first downs in all of the second half. We knew how they called two plays in the huddle so we showed one defense and jumped into a second defense when they audible. They couldn’t handle it.”

That upset placed Lee, Midland High and Permian in a tie at the top of the district with one game to play. Lee ended up beating Abilene Cooper convincingly at home, while Midland High and Permian went on the road and respectively throttled Abilene High and San Angelo Central, preserving the three-way tie.

“The Coin Toss”

No one is quite sure how the Convoy Truck Stop located between Midland and Odessa along Interstate 20 was chosen as the site of “The Coin Toss,” but it’s probably the event the mostly-forgotten business is best remembered for.

Miller said it was the Midland sheriff at the time who set up Convoy as the meeting spot, but the knowledge of the location spread like wildfire.

Former Midland Reporter-Telegram sports writer Jimmy Patterson was one of many members of the media who was in attendance for the now legendary event.

“I was the first member of the media there,” Patterson said. “I remember it was kind of a dark truck stop and no one really knew why it was picked as the spot for this. There were only a few people there at first, but the room started to fill up pretty quickly.”

Since Lee was the only team of the three to play at home, Miller and a couple members of his coaching staff were the first coaches to arrive as they waited for Gaines and Midland High head coach Doug McCutchen to return from their games out of town.

But despite being forced to wait, Miller wasn’t exactly nervous. In fact, he had his hunting gear loaded up in his car and was prepared to take off to a deer lease he owned if he lost the flip.

“We weren’t real fired up,” Miller said. “We weren’t sure we belonged in the playoffs because we had got beat by Midland High. In those days, if you got beat by Midland High, that was about the worst thing that could happen to you.

“So we weren’t real fired up because we thought we messed up. If we lost the flip, then we felt like we should have lost the flip cause we didn’t play that well.”

Once Gaines and McCutchen arrived between 1 and 2 a.m., it was agreed that the odd man out in the flip would not advance to the postseason, meaning that if two coins landed on heads and one landed on tails the team that flipped tails would be the odd man out.

“I was just sick about the thought of having to go back to the field house and tell our kids we had lost,” Gaines said. “We actually got back to the field house before the players did. I would have just been sick to tell our players we weren’t going to go to the playoffs.”

Gaines never had to make that speech.

All three coaches flipped their coins at the same time with Gaines’ rolling away under a table. McCutchen, who had flipped a 1922 silver dollar given to him by former school board member Joe Golding, originally thought his coin had landed on heads, but was later corrected to show it was on tails.

Miller used a lucky coin given to him by one of his players and had it land on heads. That left Gaines’ coin — one he had found in his pocket before the flip — which was being dug out from under a nearby table to decide the fate of Lee and Midland High.

Gaines got on all fours to see how his coin landed, and eventually called out “heads” canceling Miller’s hunting trip and leaving the Bulldogs out of the postseason for the 37th consecutive season.

“I never felt more sorry for a human being than I did for (McCutchen) that night,” Gaines said. “Somebody was going to have a bad night and it happened to be him.”

The immediate aftermath

Considering “The Coin Flip” was broadcast on both television and radio live, it didn’t take long for the Lee coaches and players to figure out they were headed to the postseason.

“(The coaches) always got together after games so we were at someone’s house waiting on the news,” former Lee assistant Mike Quinby said. “It was a big-time relief. There had been a lot of anxiety as we were waiting to see.”

In a time well before cell phones and social media, the Midland High players were left riding a bus home from Abilene wondering what their fate might be. One of those players had brought a small radio with him on the trip, though, and eventually the news was broken on that old yellow school bus.

“Probably within five minutes of someone hearing it on the radio, the whole bus knew and everybody was very upset,” said Fore Brown, who was the Bulldogs’ senior starting right guard in 1988. “We felt like we were bulletproof that season — like we were destined to win that season.

“I can tell you that was probably the biggest disappointment in my young adult life.”

Former Midland High assistant Davis Corley, who later became the Bulldogs’ head coach from 1989-1991, was on the bus that night and recalled how McCutchen, who passed away in 2011, handled the situation.

“He was very somber,” said Corley, who had known McCutchen since they were in the same first-grade class as kids growing up in Bronte. “He was extremely disappointed. I thought he did a good job of talking to the kids and easing the blow.”

McCutchen wasn’t the only educator at Midland High trying to console the Bulldogs.

“I just remember the next month we were so depressed and deflated,” Brown said. “I remember the teachers going out of their way to cheer us up and bring us out of our funk. It was like you lost somebody in your family. It hit us so hard.”

Many around the Midland High program didn’t respond with the same restraint. A public outcry of injustice for a program that hadn’t tasted the postseason in so long began to take hold and a call for changes to the tie-breaking procedures was made, despite it not being the first time Midland High had been left out of the postseason due to a coin toss.

In 1982, San Angelo Central, Odessa High, Lee and Midland High all tied for second place behind district champion Odessa Permian. A four-person coin flip tournament of sorts was conducted with Central coach Jimmie Keeling besting Midland High coach Pat Culpepper with a “tails” call.

But something about the three-team flip of 1988 set about a tornado of controversy.

“I think it was definitely because of Midland High’s deal of not having been in the playoffs for so long and the media making such a big deal about it,” Wilkins said. “If it had been between Lee, Permian and one of the Abilene schools, there might have been some blustering about it, but not to the level it was because it was Midland High.”

The 4-5A Executive Committee met shortly after the 1988 season and put in place a tie-breaker system that is still mirrored today.

The long-term ramifications

The district’s executive committee designed a system that is eight pages in length, but achieved its goal of finding a better way to determine playoff representatives.

Simply put, the new system focuses on what happens on the field, and doesn’t leave the decision of playoff representatives in the hands, or thumbs, of the coaches.

Head-to-head matchups are the initial way to decide a three or more team tie. But if one team hasn’t defeated all other teams it is tied with, a positive points system was adopted.

For example, in 1988 Midland High would have gotten 14 points for its 35-21 victory against Lee, Permian would have received the maximum 18 points for its 42-0 win against MHS and Lee would have taken one point for beating Permian, 22-21. In that case, Permian and Midland High would have been the district’s two playoff representatives.

“It’s a fairer type of tie-breaker than the luck of the Irish type of thing,” Gaines said. “It makes more sense. It’s more humane if you want to call it that.”

In the District 2-5A of today, the points tie-breaker system employs both positive and negative numbers with a cap of 15 points in either direction.

Had this system been used in 1988, Midland High would be at minus-1, Lee at minus-13 and Permian at plus-14, once again giving the Panthers and Bulldogs the playoff berth.

As unfair and controversial as the 1988 flip might have seemed, a tie-breaking system that is now used across the state was given birth out of it.

“There’s no doubt about it,” Wilkins said, “that’s the fairest way to do it.”

The “what-ifs”

For Midland High, “The Coin Flip” of 1988 seemed to continue to haunt the program for more than a decade. McCutchen left to become the coach at Duncanville in the offseason, and it was 14 more seasons before the Bulldogs would qualify for the postseason. But their first playoff run in 51 years was a memorable one.

The Bulldogs had a Cinderella season and eventually played for a state title in 2002, losing to Converse Judson, 33-32, in heartbreaking fashion.

But could the 1988 Bulldogs have made a similar run? It’s a question Brown wishes he could have had a chance to answer.

“There’s always ‘what-ifs’ every time I watch one of those films of us playing,” Brown said. “We were driven and well-coached. I believe we could have gone far.”

Miller agrees. The Rebels were ousted in the opening round of the postseason by Amarillo Palo Duro, which Miller recalls as a “great team with at least eight kids that went Division I.” He said Midland High probably would have fared better.

“That was Midland High’s best team in years,” Miller said. “It didn’t turn out the way it should have, but that’s the way it went down because we didn’t have any rule but to flip a coin. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if they could have beat Amarillo (Palo Duro), but they probably could have done better than we did.”

The fact they shared a district title and had to win a coin flip to get into the playoffs was disappointing for the 1988 Panthers. They had advanced to the state semifinals in 1987, losing to Plano High at Ratliff Stadium, and expectations were to return there.

The 1988 season ended with a disappointing 14-9 loss to Dallas Carter in the state semifinals. Future NFL linebacker Jesse Armstead knocked down a Permian pass on fourth-and-6 with less than a minute to play, securing the victory for Carter. Carter later was forced to forfeit the 1988 season, in which it won a state title, for grade tampering.

Permian did end up winning a state title the following year, going 16-0 in 1989.

The legacy of “The Coin Flip”

“The Coin Flip” has been forever immortalized, not only in Bissinger’s book, but also in the film by the same name.

Gaines, who is a central figure in Friday Night Lights, claims he still hasn’t read the book, but he has watched the film in which he is portrayed by actor Billy Bob Thornton. Gaines said “The Coin Toss” scene in the movie was well depicted.

“It gave me butterflies again,” said Gaines, who retired after coaching Permian in the 2012 season — his eighth at Permian in two separate four-year tenures. “It was just real gut-wrenching to watch again.”

This year was the silver anniversary for “The Coin Flip” and an event of its liking has not taken place in West Texas’ most-decorated district since its inception. It is a possibility, though.

Under current District 2-5A policy, in the unlikely event that three or more teams are still tied after a head-to-head tiebreaker and figuring in positive and negative points, the tie will be broken by a coin toss with the odd man qualifying for the postseason. Once that one is selected, then the tie-breaking system goes back to head-to-head, then positive/negative points and then once again a coin toss if needed.

For those who were at the Convoy Truck Stop on that fateful night 25 years ago, it probably gives them pause to consider “The Coin Toss” could potentially be repeated in history.

After all, nobody in the Petroplex wants to see a season decided at a truck stop instead of on a football field ever again.

How they got there: Lee, MHS and Permian tied for the District 4-5A championship with 5-1 records.

Weapons: McCutchen -- 1922 Silver Dollar given to him by Joe Golden, a former board member and team supporter. Miller -- Lucky coin given to him by undisclosed player. Gaines -- Coin in his pocket at the time.

Outcome: Heads for Miller and Gaines, tails for McCutchen. Permian and Lee go to the playoffs, Midland High goes home after 9-1 season. Lee also lands district ball.

What Might Have Been

A look at how the 1988 seasons would have been decided if the positive points tie-breaker adopted in the following season or the the current positive and negative points tie-breaker system had been in place instead of the coin toss.

Positive points

Lee 22, Permian 21. Lee earns one point.

Midland High 35, Lee 21. MHS earns 14 points.

Permian 42, Midland High 0. Permian earns a maximum of 18 points.

Outcome: With two spots up for grabs, Permian and Midland High would have qualified. Permian would have been the No. 1 seed and Midland High the No. 2 seed.

Outcome: Permian is plus-14. MHS is minus-1. Lee is minus-13. With two spots up for grabs, Permian and Midland High would have qualified. Permian would have been the No. 1 seed and Midland High the No. 2 seed.